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New Environment Art

It’s been a while since the last update, everything is progressing nicely but a lot of what has been done this past month hasn’t been visual enough to show to you, until now.

New Environment Concept

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a proof of concept for the way the environment is now going to look and work. You can see this below. It’s not an 100% perfect representation as there will be cars, objects, lamp posts and more road markings in the final game but it should give you a good idea of the direction we are heading.

The previous set of environment art was created using tiled blocks, this technique worked well but came with a few problems and it was these problems that caused me to re-think the strategy behind how it would work and ultimately look. The new technique we’ll be using for mapping the environment will use tiled squares for the floor elements as before but for the building elements rather than using tiled blocks we’ll now be using longer cut up strips, I’ve made an example of this below.

The new method of mapping means that the environment art can now look more detailed and can allow me to do more interesting things with buildings such as destroying them. Previously doing this with small tiled elements would have been a chore. This new method will also speed up the creation of the artwork as well as shortening the amount of time it takes to create the final in game map files. Another benefit is that there will now be less overdraw as buildings aren’t getting drawn as lots of individual tiles layered over each other; This will greatly benefit the Android and iOS versions of the game which were previously running a tad slow. The one down side is that I’ve decided to cap the height of the buildings, this doesn’t mean that we can’t increase the height later down the line however and to be honest it looks pretty good regardless.

Hopefully you all agree that this looks much better than before.

Steam Green Lit

In other news which you may have already noticed on other gaming sites or seen me mentioning on Steam, Twitter or Facebook is that we have now been successfully green lit by the lovely folks on Steam. This is absolutely fantastic news and means we are eligible for things such as Steam Early Access which we are very much contemplating doing.

A massive massive thank you to all of you for supporting, following and of course voting. We couldn’t have done this without you all and I am incredibly honoured and grateful for your continued support! Thanks!

For those of you who like stats here a few for you.
Days it took to get the green light : 92
Total current unique visitors : 50,104
Total yes votes : 14,307
Total current followers : 980
Total current favourites : 1,012

Video Diary #2

All being well in the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing another video diary regarding some of the new features, watch this space.